Senator Joe Barton Opening Statement House Energy and Commerce Committee

WASHINGTON - Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Joe Barton, R-Texas, today made the following statement during the Energy and Environment Subcommittee hearing entitled, “The Climate Challenge: National Security Threats and Economic Opportunities”:

“I am skeptical that mankind is causing global warming. I do agree that the climate is changing - that’s self-evident. But because I’m a registered professional engineer, I have a problem with finding that mankind is the cause after I look at all the evidence of the past cycles to see what’s different from this one. The expert IPCC models, unless they’ve miraculously improved them in the last four months, don’t even do a very good job of predicting the past.  Half the time they get the degree of change and direction wrong even though they know all the factors exactly.  Maybe that’s changed some in the last six months and maybe some of these witnesses can educate me on that.

“We understand that global warming is a theory and it may even be a practical theory, but I’m not yet ready to accept that it’s a theology. Some of the more fervent global warming advocates do take it as theology or a pseudo-religion. When we try to debate the facts, they get intensely upset.

“Global warming advocates believe that humanity’s CO2 emissions harm the earth by raising the global temperature, and they say that only draconian action led by the U.S. will save the planet. The U.S. cap-and-trade group that testified before the full committee several weeks ago supports a proposal that would cut CO2 emissions by 80 percent in the United States by 2050. Again, I’m willing to be corrected, but my understanding is if we cut our CO2 emissions by 80 percent, we’re back to levels we last experienced in the United States around World War I when we had about 120 million people in this country and half of those lived on farms and the per capita income was measured in the hundreds of dollars a year.

“If we do what the advocates say we should do, the econometric models, which I believe are more accurate, almost guarantee two- to three-percent GDP negative growth - in other words, a contraction of GDP - on an annual basis. If you want to launch another Great Depression, do some of the things that result in that kind of contraction.

“Instead of heading back to the Bronze Age, I think we should look to the future for solutions. I think it is possible on a bipartisan basis to do things that actually further the science, further the research into carbon capture and conversion, and accelerate the use of existing technologies like nuclear power and some of the alternative energy sources that we know are zero-emission, like wind power or new hydro power. We can have a bipartisan solution or bipartisan proposal.

“No poor country values its environment more than it values its people’s ability to make a living. It’s one thing to ask industrialized society to do with a little less, but it’s another thing entirely to ask an evolving society not to do at all. If you go to some of the countries in Africa and Asia and some of the former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe, and ask them to just not have what we’ve taken for granted in this country for the last 50 years, I think we’re going to get a rude surprise about what kind of lives that people want to lead.  They’re just not going to do what we want.  If the choice is wash your clothes in the ditch or put in electricity that’s generated by a coal-fired power plant so that you can actually buy a washing machine, most nations are going to build the coal-fired power plant. That’s why we need to do things like Mr. Boucher’s bill on CO2 research for conversion and capture, and also do some of the things I’ve already alluded to.

“Suffice it to say I’m very involved in this debate, Mr. Chairman.  The process is that we’re going to do the hearings before we move the bill - that is somewhat unique in this Congress - and I appreciate your doing that.  I look forward to today’s hearing.”

By Paul Chesser in the American Spectator

A global warming alarmist group that masqueraded for the last few years as an objective consultant for many states announced this week that it has been disowned by its global warming alarmist parents . Not that that will change anything.

The Center for Climate Strategies, whose failed track record spreads beyond the warming mythology, announced its separation last week from the Pennsylvania Environmental Council. For a long time CCS hawkers Tom Peterson and Ken Colburn (video), while promoting their climate environoia (video), hid their bond with PEC. Now they say they were related all along.

To recap, here’s how this scheme was birthed. Years ago PEC, which says it is “a catalyst for legislative, regulatory and policy change by public and private decision-makers to advance solutions that are in the best environmental and economic interests of the Commonwealth,” decided to export its activism outside Pennsylvania. It created Enterprising Environmental Solutions (why has its website been taken down?), which housed CCS, with the goal (PDF of their tax return) of “form(ing) EESI to carry out their non-regulatory agenda,” as “EESI has their own board of directors and is controlled by PEC, since PEC is the only member of EESI.” Despite this clear statement, CCS’s executive director Peterson said, “(EESI) does not have an advocacy mission, and it doesn’t have an advocacy history.”

A bit of alphabet soup, but the gist is that Peterson disavowed CCS’s IRS-granted purpose. He also apparently hid the center’s agenda from the states it sought business from. Peterson, his lieutenant Colburn, and CCS have zipped around the country to pitch (mostly) governors (or their administrations) on this premise, in my own paraphrasing:

There is a human-caused global warming crisis and the states must do something about it, because the federal government is not. We ask the governor to issue an executive order that confirms this crisis and creates a commission to study greenhouse gas emissions—but call it a “climate commission.” Appoint members who buy into the anthropogenic global warming crisis, and include some representatives from utilities and business, but not too many or they might screw things up. Once you hire CCS, we will take care of everything for you from then on: run the meetings, set the agendas, write the meeting minutes, provide technical analysis, maintain the website, and establish the voting rules. Oh, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and other global warming alarmist foundations have provided the funding for our work, so don’t you worry! Just let CCS do its thing.

While Peterson and Colburn have been far from transparent about their origins (they also hide how much they get paid), the work CCS does has also been thoroughly discredited. They forbade any debate or discussion about global warming science. As they wooed states out of as much money as they could (not much, it turns out) to reduce the burden on their subsidizers—mainly the Rockefeller Brothers Fund—they peddled incompetent economics (Green jobs! Cost savings!) in every state where they worked. They could not produce analysis in any state that showed the effect their policy recommendations would have upon climate—ostensibly the purpose for their state commissions. And besides their disregard for recent observed climatological trends, they continue to promote obsolete technologies like biofuels, which recent studies show have increased greenhouse gas emissions rather than reduced them.

Read more on how this group has caused many of the states to further endanger their future economic recovery here. See also this Paul Chesser story on the CCS PEC connection here.

Posted by Marc Morano, EPW

Scientists at the UK Met office “launched a blistering attack on scientific colleagues and journalists who exaggerate the effects of global warming.” The Met office, “one of the most prestigious research facilities in the world” according to the February 11, 2009, article in the UK Guardian, is no hotbed of climate skeptics, as the organization accepts the UN IPCC view of man-made global warming. A U.S. climate expert has also declared that “the political consensus surrounding climate policy is collapsing,” and a U.S. Naval Academy chemist has accused the media of “journalistic malpractice” for hyping warming fears. Furthermore, NASA’s James Hansen and RealClimate.org have also come under renewed criticism. 

The scientists at the UK Met Office lamented the “recent ‘apocalyptic predictions’ about Arctic ice melt,” according to the UK Guardian newspaper. Dr. Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, warned that “there is little evidence to support claims that Arctic ice has reached a tipping point and could disappear within a decade or so,” according to the UK Guardian. “The record-breaking losses in the past couple of years could easily be due to natural fluctuations in the weather, with summer ice increasing again over the next few years,” Pope explained.

Pope’s Arctic ice view echoes the 2008 U.S. Senate Minority Report on Arctic sea ice and polar bears. The January 20, 2008, report featured “the latest peer-reviewed science detailing the natural causes of recent Arctic ice changes.”

Climate researcher Dr. Peter Stott echoed Pope, warning that “dramatic predictions of accelerating temperature rise and sea ice decline, based on a few readings, could backfire when natural variability swings the other way and the trends seem to reverse,” the paper reported. “It just confuses people,” Stott added. Despite these attacks on their fellow scientists and the media, both Pope and Stott continue to believe that man-made global warming is real and should be addressed, in contrast to a growing number of scientists who now believe ”the ­science has, quite simply, gone awry.”

Senator James Inhofe, the Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee forewarned of the same situation back in 2006. “Yes—it appears that alarmism has led to skepticism,” then EPW chairman Inhofe said in a floor speech on September 25, 2006. 

‘Climate policy collapsing’

This latest warning about global warming alarmism follows the declaration that ”the political consensus surrounding climate policy is collapsing” by University of Colorado Professor Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. on February 7, 2009. 
Pielke, Jr., accepts the UN IPCC view of global warming, bluntly called the current carbon trading based policy proposals to address man-made global warming “fictional and fantasy.”

“The political consensus surrounding climate policy is collapsing. If you are not aware of this fact you will be very soon,” Pielke, Jr., who is in the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at University of Colorado, wrote.

Read much more here.